Chapter 11
Just before Christmas, my father got a cold, which you wouldn’t think would be a big deal, but it turned out to be the start of another ongoing battle with my father.
My father came into the living room one morning, sniffling and complaining of coming down with something, I looked in my medicine cabinet (a small cabinet I set aside as such in my kitchen) to see what I could give him. He asked me if I had any Sudafed. I said I did, to which he proceeded to excitedly expound the virtues of Sudafed. I thought you hadn’t even had to take an aspirin in ten years? Later that evening as I was getting out the Sudafed to give my father, I happened to read the back of the package which said do not take if you have high blood pressure. Crap, he has severe high blood pressure. He shouldn’t be taking this. At that moment, my father came into the kitchen. I told him what I just read and said that I would go to the store the next morning to get him something else.
“I do NOT have high blood pressure! I’m as healthy as I horse. There’s nothing wrong with me!” He yelled in response.
Here we go again. “Dad, it’s not a big deal. We’ll just go to the store in the morning and get you something else. It says you shouldn’t be taking Sudafed because it could cause you to have a stroke. I don’t want anything to happen to you. They have plenty of other things at the store that you can take.” I said calmly as I put the Sudafed back into the cabinet. My father then went on for about ten minutes about how Sudafed had always worked wonders for him and he had never had a stroke and how he’d been taking it all his life. The makers of Sudafed would be proud of this life long customer willing to die rather than take something else. To try and quiet him, I started to talk about all the stuff he used to make me take as a kid. Especially this cough medicine called “666”. And it was from hell. It looked like urine and tasted twice as bad as I can imagine urine must taste. It worked in one dose, I think because when your body tasted it, you didn’t ever want the stuff in your mouth ever again. My father laughed at that and seemed to calm down. The Sudafed crisis was over. Or so I thought.
The next day when my father came out of his bedroom he seemed to be feeling fine. I asked him if he still wanted to go to the store to get some other cold medicine; he hesitated for a second and then said no, he was feeling much better. What’s up? Something’s not right. After breakfast, my father went into his room and I went to the medicine cabinet. Sure enough, the Sudafed was gone. Oh my god, he’s stolen the whole package. Now what do I do? I can’t let him take them. I gathered all my motherly strength and yelled,
“DAD, GET IN HERE RIGHT NOW!”
My dad came into the room smiling happily. Okay, Les. You can do this.
“Dad, I know you stole the Sudafed out of the medicine cabinet so I’m not even going to ask you about it. You need to bring it in here right now. You cannot take it. We will go get you something else if you’re still not feeling well, but you need to bring me the entire pack right now.” I said with authority.
I think my father was so stunned that he didn’t even try and protest. He turned, went back into his room and came back with the entire package.
“Thank you. And Dad, I have little kids running around here. We cannot have you stealing medications and leaving them out for one of them to find and accidentally take, so I am going to put an alarm on the cabinet for the future.”
My father just stood there looking at me for a minute then turned around, went back to his room, closed the door and didn’t come out again until dinner. I hated doing that, but what else was I supposed to do? Later that night, Mike put a baby latch on the door and I put a small alarm on that I had bought for our windows that stuck to the side of the door so that when turned on, if there was any motion on the door it would let me know someone was messing with it. That quieted the Sudafed debate for awhile. And my father never did steal anything out of the cabinet. The only problem was, when I tried to give him his medications that night at dinner he said, “No thank you.”
“What do you mean “No thank you? Dad, you need to take these medicines, the doctor at the VA said so.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t like the way they make me…” He said getting that evil grin again and that was that. When he got up from the dinner table that night he left his medication sitting on his napkin untouched. Great now what do I do?
I assumed that it was the anti-psychotics that were the medicines that made him feel weird. Since getting his medication from the VA, I had noticed that besides the weird sitting and staring, he did seem a bit more confused during the day and when he did get upset, it was twice as bad as before he started taking the meds. I just couldn’t be sure if that was the progression of the disease or the medication. Mike was home the next day so I tried to call the VA to speak to the doctor or a nurse about it. They were not available when I called so I left several messages, but got no response. I did finally get to speak with the social worker who said that she would have someone call me back, but no one ever did. I even tried the Alzheimer’s Association, but their only advice was to crush up the medicines and put it into my father’s food or drink to get him to take it and to talk to the VA doctor about any adverse reactions.
To be able to crush the medicines, I needed to get a pestle and mortar. Since Mike was home, my father agreed to go shopping, so we gathered the whole family and went to our local apothecary. My father seemed to really enjoy looking at all “this weird stuff” as he called it while I bought what I needed. That night before dinner, Mike and I started a ritual that would last the rest of my father’s stay. When my father went into his room, I gathered all of his medications and brought them into my bathroom, along with some old cough medicine cups and the pestle and mortar. Every night, I would grind up enough medicine for each of my father’s doses for the next day and put them into the individual cups and then run back into the kitchen, hide them in the medicine cabinet and turn on the alarm. At each meal, I would sneak his medicine into or under his food or into his drink without him seeing. Or so I thought.
Some time in January, Mike was home for the day so that I could go take an exam for school. Mike had been out of town for several days, so after the exam I took advantage of the time out alone to run some errands and see some friends. While I was out, my cell phone rang. It was Mike and he was furious. “You need to get home and deal with your father right now!” So much for my alone time.
When I got home both Mike and my father were furious and facing off in the living room. I asked what happened and Mike explained. Apparently, my father had gotten up and said that he wanted to go to the store. Mike thought nothing of it, so he said sure and had taken him to our local grocery store. In the store, my father had started talking about coming down with something and wanting some Sudafed, again. Mike tried to explain to my father that he couldn’t take Sudafed because of his high blood pressure but my father had told him that he didn’t have high blood pressure and that was just something that I had made up to try and lock him up. Mike said that he had tried to enlist the help of the pharmacist in explaining why my father shouldn’t take Sudafed, but my father kept insisting that there was nothing wrong with him. Mike said that they had gotten into a screaming match in the middle of the store when he had refused to buy the medicine for my father. My father then remembered the money I had left for him, which he had brought with him and then had insisted on buying the Sudafed himself. Here we go again! I told Mike to go take a walk or have a smoke and that I would deal with my father. While Mike was relaying the day’s events, my father had sat down in the rocker. Once Mike left, I turned to my father to try and reason with him about the Sudafed again. He started his usual loud protest about there being nothing wrong with him. I cut him off and told him again that he did indeed have high blood pressure and that I was not going to allow him to take something that could kill him. I told him that he needed to give me the Sudafed and that I would take him to the store to get him something else that would not harm him. This time he was not so compliant. He actually told me that he didn’t have any Sudafed. Geez, this is like dealing with a spoiled child. I stood there wracking my brain, trying to figure out how to get through to him. Okay, if he won’t listen to me, then I will have to get help somewhere else. “Look, Dad, I’m tired of arguing with you. You do have high blood pressure, whether you want to admit it or not. Sudafed could possibly kill you and I will not let you do that in my house. So, if you won’t listen to me, I’m going to have to call someone else to make you give it to me.”
“Fine, you call!” He said calling my bluff.
“Fine, I will, but if I do, you need to know that the thing that I have been trying to avoid might happen. These people might come and lock you up for your own good.”
“I knew it, you just want to lock me up and take my stuff!”
“No Dad, I’ve been doing everything I can NOT to lock you up but if you won’t listen to me, I have no choice.”
“Fine, you call them! They aren’t gonna lock me up! I’m not crazy! You’re just making it up.”
“Fine Dad, have it your way.” I went to the phone and called the social worker at the VA. Luckily, I actually got through right away. I explained what was going on and asked if she would talk to my father. She said that since she wasn’t a doctor she really didn’t think that she could help. I told her that I didn’t think that it would matter; I just needed someone who seemed to have some sort of authority to tell him the truth instead of it coming from me. She still said that she couldn’t help me. Thanks! I hung up with her and called the Alzheimer’s Association hotline and explained what was going on and asked if they could help. I got the same answer. I asked if there was anything that they could think of for me to do. The woman suggested that maybe I could call Adult Protective Services. I thanked her for the number, hung up and called. I explained to the woman on the phone again what was going on and asked if she would talk to my father. She thankfully said “yes” and I held the phone out to my father. He looked at me angrily and said, “Who is it?” I told him that it was someone who wanted to talk to him. My father took the phone and listened. I watched his face change as he listened, from angry to confused, and finally frightened.
After a few minutes, my father got up and handed me back the phone and walked into his bedroom. The woman on the other end said that because I had called they would have to file a report which meant that someone would have to come out to check on my father’s welfare and that she had told my father that. As she spoke, my father slowly came back out and handed me the unopened package of Sudafed and sat back down in the rocker defeated. I thanked her and hung up. As I went to put the phone down and the Sudafed away, my father began again with his “I knew you were trying to lock me up” tirade. I don’t know what happened, but I snapped.
I rounded on my father and started screaming at the top of my lungs. “God damn it, Dad! For the last time, I am NOT trying to lock you up! If I were trying to lock you up I could have done it weeks, hell, months ago with all the crazy things you’ve been doing!”
“There’s nothing wrong with me!”
“Oh, really Dad, there’s nothing wrong with you! Then why do I have to go into your room every day to try and figure out where you’ve peed!” My father looked at me in shock at that statement. “Yeah Dad, I know you’ve been peeing in your laundry and in the trash can and in cups and hiding them all over your room at night. Where the hell do you think all those cups go to every day!? Why do you think I wash out your trash can everyday!? Why do you think I do your laundry everyday!?! If I was trying to lock you up, that alone would give me grounds to do it, but I haven’t because I’ve been trying to take care of you like you did for grandma!”
“You’re grandmother hated you.” He replied without much conviction.
“You know what Dad, just by you saying that to me every time you get mad let’s me know that the Dementia, yes Dementia, is affecting you! Because you wouldn’t say something so mean if you were in your right mind! I know grandma hated me, so you might as well stop saying it! It doesn’t matter! What matters is you are sick! I know you don’t want to admit it, but you are! You can’t find the bathroom during the day which is right across from your room. At night, you get locked in a room that has no lock on the door. You insist that you’ve taken showers upstairs in my house when my house only has one floor! You insist that my house has thirteen bathrooms and that I’m moving them! Someone in their right mind wouldn’t say something like that! I know that you want to go home to Florida, but Dad there is no home to go back to.” I said a bit calmer. “Grandma’s house has been sold. You live here now. I know it’s hard to have to rely on someone when you’ve always taken care of yourself, but Dad, that’s what I’m here for. I’m your daughter. I love you and I’m doing my best to take care of you. You asked me to come and get you because you were hallucinating and scared. You have got to stop fighting me and let me help you.” I finished sitting down on the floor in front of the rocker. I sat there breathing heavily for a few minutes not knowing what else to do.
All of a sudden, my Dad started talking softly. I looked up and saw tears slowly running down his face. I had never seen my dad cry before. I leaned over and put my hands on my dad’s lap and listened to him talk. I don’t remember exactly what he said. A lot of it was mixed up and confusing. He talked about people telling him to put “Mother” into a nursing home and how he hadn’t wanted to because he had promised her that he would never do that. He talked about “Pops” and when he died. He talked about when he thought he started to lose his memory. He said that he remembered hearing a “pop” inside his head and that’s when things had started to get mixed up after that. He talked about Elaine and Florida and the Elks and a bunch of other stuff. As he spoke, he had a far away look on his face. Tears continued to stream down his face as he spoke. I sat there, with my hands on his lap, quietly listening to everything that he said.
I don’t know exactly how long he spoke, but I know it was at least an hour. While my dad talked, Mike came back into the house at some point. I waved him off with a look and he went to pick the boys up from school and daycare. When my dad finished talking, I held his hand and we sat there in silence, not looking at each other until the mood was broken by the sound of the kids coming into the house. I got up and got my dad a tissue. As my dad wiped his face and blew his nose, I sat on the edge of the fireplace hearth next to the rocking chair and spoke to him quietly. I told him that since he was having trouble finding his way out of his room at night, I would call the VA and ask them to send us a portable toilet to put into his room. I told him that I would remind him every other day about taking a shower. I also told him that Mike and I had talked about looking for a bigger house for all of us, so that we weren’t so crowded and maybe, we could even get a place where he would have a bathroom of his own in his room. The last thing I told him was that I would do everything in my power to take care of him like he took care of his mother and not have him locked away anywhere ever. He said “okay” and “thank you” and got up and went into his bedroom and closed the door.
After my dad left the room, I went to the store and bought some Coricidin HBP. Later that night, when I put my dad’s medicine on his napkin he said, “Don’t you need to put it in my drink?” So much for my stealth tactics. Again things at home got quiet, for awhile.
During the quiet period, after the Sudafed incident, I had a brief medical scare of my own.
I was standing in the kitchen talking to Mike and was hit hard by a sharp pain on the left side of my chest, followed by heart palpitations and shortness of breath. I called my doctor who told me to come in immediately. I was put through a battery of tests; EKG, x-rays and blood work. Once the results were in and after talking to me, my doctor said that it was stress. Ya think!?!? He prescribed Clozapan to help me sleep and told me to try and take it easy. Yeah right.
Chapter 12
Throughout the time that my father was with us, I had to deal with problematic phone calls. Some, like those from Elaine, Sam and my friends were easily dealt with. Others, like those from family members and the doctors at my grandmother’s nursing home, were not so easy. Eventually, I had to tell everyone I knew not to call my home phone at all and to call my cell phone and leave messages. I kept my cell phone off most of the time during the day and would check it each night or whenever I got the chance during the day. It was a pain in the ass, but it helped to keep the peace.
The calls from the nursing home staff were more than difficult, they were strange, to say the least. Because of my father’s increasing paranoia, whenever I talked on the phone or brought up the subject of his mother, I had to pretend to be talking pleasantly to a friend whenever they called.
It has long been a habit of mine, when I get a phone call to go into the garage and talk and smoke. Number one, it keeps me from being rude and bothering anyone who may be inside trying to watch television and number two, it keeps me from being rude to callers by yelling at the kids to keep it down every few seconds. To my father, my phone departures were evidence that I was hiding what I was saying because I was talking about him and trying to lock him up.
Before I made the ban on home phone calls, every phone call was a potential day ruiner. I tried to reassure him by taking phone calls in front of him, but in his increasing paranoia he still insisted that I was talking about him and trying to lock him up, even when he could hear my phone call from start to finish. Sometimes the phone calls sent my father straight out the door on a mission home and other times it just made him angry and hard to deal with. Either way, it was a no-win situation for me, so I tried not to talk on the phone at all.
From the time the entire ordeal with my father started, I had to field at least weekly, if not daily, calls from my cousin, Frankie. Sometimes the calls were benign inquires into my grandmother’s health and welfare. Other times the calls turned into arguments about how I was handling things.
One really unpleasant phone call with Frankie was a result of a call from one of the doctors at my grandmother’s nursing home. I was sitting on the couch watching TV with my father when my home phone rang. I jumped up and grabbed the phone. When I said hello the person on the other end identified themselves as one of the doctors from Mariner. He said that he was calling to discuss a serious medical issue that had come up with my grandmother. He told me that they had found a softball sized lump in my grandmother’s breast and he wanted to know if he had permission to do a full mastectomy. I responded the way that I always did to phone calls when my father was in the room… I acted as if I was having the best, happiest, most light heartedly, fun phone conversation ever. The poor doctor must have thought I was a complete lunatic as I laughed and giggled through our phone call. I had an entire fifteen minute conversation with the man about the removal of my grandmother’s breast sounding like a teenager drunk for the first time. Not only did I have to sound overly pleasant, I also had to be as vague as possible about the calls subject matter because my father became aggressively agitated when his mother was mentioned. Thankfully, on this day my father had been in a good mood and had not reacted at all to the phone call. About an hour later, I told my father that I was going to the bus stop to pick up Dayton. I pocketed my cell phone as I left with Ian. Once around the corner, where my father couldn’t see me, I called the doctor back to explain why I sounded so inappropriately cheerful during our last conversation. He told me that he had thought the call had been a bit odd and was relieved when I explained myself. Is this how the rest of my life is going to be? Talking to people on the phone sounding like I’m stark raving mad to appease someone who is losing their mind? I wonder if Dad went through this with Mama Moore?
Later that evening, after Mike came home from work, I went into the garage and called Frankie to tell her about the phone call from the doctor. When I told her that I had given the doctor permission to do the full mastectomy, Frankie went ballistic. She started yelling at me that there was no reason for them to take the breast of an 89 year old woman. When I tried to explain the size and severity of the tumor, she continued to yell at me for allowing the doctors to experiment on my grandmother. She said that doctors just wanted to cut up black people for no reason and that she knew that there was no reason for my grandmother to have to have surgery. What!?!? What the hell are you talking about!?! The doctor said that the tumor was so large that it was starting to break through the skin! I can’t just let that go, that’s got to be painful! Doctors just want to experiment on black people!?! What year is this!?!? I mean, I know it has been done in the past, but you’ve got to be kidding me!?!?
I tried for over an hour to reason with my cousin, but she just kept yelling at me until I couldn’t take it anymore. I went into the kitchen and flagged Mike down and asked him to call me from one of the other phones so that I could tell Frankie I had a call and hang up. She and I would have many similar phone calls throughout this ordeal.
Since I was now taking over the guardianship duties for my grandmother from my father, I had to make a few calls on behalf of my grandmother. Some of these phone calls proved to be weird and difficult. The first weird one was regarding paperwork detailing my grandmother’s funeral arrangements. My grandmother had planned for her passing, in detail, and left instructions on the funeral home and cemetery that she wanted. I first called the funeral home and asked for the owner, Mr. Gaines, whose name was mentioned on the paperwork that my grandmother left. The woman on the phone was extremely brisk with me when she asked what it was in reference to. I explained briefly who I was and why I was calling. I figured that since this was a local Ft. Pierce funeral home that I knew had been around for quite some time, once I mentioned my grandmother’s name, the woman on the phone would get more pleasant. That didn’t happen. She continued to curtly answer my questions as vaguely as possible until I got frustrated and finally asked her to please have the owner call me. Mr. Gaines did finally call me a few weeks later and thankfully, was pleasant and very helpful. I also called the cemetery that my grandmother had indicated she wanted to be buried in, which was also where her second husband, Mr. Moore, was buried. Everyone at the cemetery was very nice, but they did inform me that there was a problem. My grandmother had been making payments on her burial plot, but my father had stopped them and taken back the payments for everything except the actual plot of ground itself; the headstone and support services for burial were no longer paid for. GREAT! Now what do I do? I thanked the gentleman that I had been speaking to and decided to deal with it later.
After forwarding my grandmother’s mail to my house, I received paperwork from an investment group that my grandmother had been involved in. On the paper, it named Ralph Flowers as the legal representative for the group. He was an old school buddy of my father’s. I felt the same about Ralph as I did about Sam; I didn’t really like him much. I have heard some not so great rumors about Ralph from my father and other people in the years since meeting him that I won’t go into. I only bring it up to say, I didn’t trust him. I’ve known Ralph since I was in high school, when my parents hired him to be my lawyer after I got into a fight in school, with a teacher’s daughter. It was NOT my fault! She started it! Okay, so I hit her first, but she called me a whore and she wasn’t even a relative. I got charged with assault after the girl ended up getting twenty-seven stitches above her eye. I couldn’t help that the girl couldn’t fight her way out of a wet paper bag. And hey, she fractured my pinkie knuckle with her face. I should have sued! That incident is also when and why I got kicked out of school for good, for being a threat to the faculty and the student body, according to her mother… All 105lbs of me.
I called around trying to find Ralph’s number but it was unlisted. I eventually called my mother and she found the number for me. I called Ralph and left several messages over several days before I finally got a hold of him. I explained to him what had been going on and told him that if my grandmother was owed any money, it would need to go to the nursing home. Ralph asked me if I had my grandmother’s deed to her portion of the investment group. I told him, no, I didn’t know anything about it. He told me that my grandmother was indeed owed money monthly from the investment group but since I did not have her deed, he wasn’t sure what to do. He then said that he would look into it and call me back. Several months later, Ralph sent me a letter saying that since I did not have the deed that there was nothing that he could do. What do you mean nothing you can do? Why can’t you send my grandmother HER money in the nursing home? What does that have to do with the deed? You said yourself that she is owed money. I tried calling him several times after that, to ask exactly that, but I never got an answer or a return phone call, so I dropped the issue. I did call the business office of the nursing home and told them what happened and left it at that. I had enough on my plate to deal with.
In December, I got a phone call from a lawyer in California saying that my grandmother’s brother had died and left her part of his estate. I explained what was going on regarding my father, who was my grandmother’s true legal guardian. She told me that it would take her awhile to calculate exactly how much would be going to my grandmother and in the meantime I should get a lawyer. Get a lawyer,? For what? I’m not my grandmother’s legal guardian. The money is just going to have to go to the nursing home. I hope that it’s not too much, because if it is, this is going to be a nightmare.
One of the other things that happened repeatedly during this time, which astounded me, was neighbors who would continually have their kids come to my house after school for me to baby-sit for hours. The even crazier thing about this was that the two culprits of this should have known better. The first was my new neighbor across the street after Arlington and his wife moved away. The wife was a nurse and the husband was an educated man. You would think someone working in the medical profession, even WITHOUT me telling her the things that my father was doing whenever I saw her, that she would not a.) Put her son in a situation to possibly be witness to the kind of unstable behavior that my father was capable of and b.) Would not give her neighbor another burden to deal with when I already had enough on my plate. I finally had to say as much, after 1) A month of her son coming to my house everyday, directly after school and staying until 6:30 or later without ever asking if this was okay. Let alone saying thank you or ever offering to maybe take MY kids out of the house to help ME out just to be nice! and 2) My father went on a verbally offensive rampage one day while her son was at my house. The other neighbor, who was two doors down from the first, for some strange reason decided to pick up where the first had left off. The husband was a business owner and not home a lot, so I’m not sure if he knew that his son was at my house with a potentially volatile person. The wife on the other hand was a teacher and knew very well, from talking to me, what was going on in my house. I spoke up after about two weeks with this one. I was beyond the point of niceties at that point. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE!
